p365

Another week in 2012 has gone into history, and the week was as unique as the previous one for Project 365. This is Day 237 through Day 243 of 366 photos for the year so far (you can see the full gallery on Flickr here). Seems I can’t get by a week without having some different sunrise or sunset photo. The weather here down in the south has been dynamic as far as the clouds go, just without much rain. This week was a hard week for different reasons, and for different people. Often it seems there are so many different people and situations that need and deserve prayer, yet it can quickly become overwhelming if you try to take it all on yourself. Of course that’s not the point of prayer, and thank God He is never overwhelmed by our prayer requests, or number of prayers we offer.

The photo above that leads off this post is a draft of a poem on prayer I worked on this week. Surprisingly, once I started working on it, the bulk of the verse came together faster than any other poetic attempt, and I really only had to rewrite it a few times. If you have followed this blog at all you will know I have tried to put my creative mind to work through photography, reading, and writing, which includes poetry here and there. Poetry is one of those art forms our culture has ignored to such a point that it captured my attention, maybe because it has been so highly ignored by my generation. This is not to say I am a poet, but I do make attempts. Poetry is like photography in that if I never took any photos, there is a 100% chance I would never improve.

One thing I have learned about poetry is it’s every bit as difficult as I thought it was. It is difficult to understand at times, it’s extremely difficult to write, and overwhelmingly difficult to write well. Anyway, what I have learned about poetry is that when simple prose are inadequate to express the greatness at hand, poetry steps in and creates an entirely different level of expression, and that is incredible. Look for this poem later in the week, but this week, the images of the week include this attempt at poetry on prayer. If you are wondering about the bubbles image below, check out Weekly Photo Challenge: Purple, Oil and Water for an explanation.

This is for the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge of Purple. I hate posting the same old thing, and trying to find unique and creative ways to do things is just one thing I love about photography. The photo above happens to also serve as my Project 365 photo for Day 243, getting closer and closer to that 300 day mark. If you are wondering how I did this, great, because it’s not that hard, but does take some patience and a bit of prep work. Every time I do this kind of photography it always turns out different, which makes it a unique technique to try.

The image above, and the other below, are simply a mixing of ordinary cooking oil, and tap water, placed together in a glass cooking bowl or cake pan. Making the colors is the fun part, you can be creative here, use food coloring, fabrics, a colored bowl, or like I did here, just different colors of copy paper. Here I used two yellow and two purple pieces of paper off-set with each other where they all came together in the center. That is how you get that the bubbles with a mix of different colors. To use paper, you just place is under a clear glass bowl, to use food coloring, just place a white piece of paper under a clear bowl.

The hard part is getting the focus to work because there are several different focal points, like the bottom of the bowl, the water, the bubbles, and paper under the bowl and so on. In this case, I used a Nikon D7000 camera body, a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 lens, mounted on a Nikon PK-13 (27.5mm) extension tube (extension tubes are really cheap if you have a DSLR). Using an extension tube is a way to do macro photography without having to buy an expensive macro lens. If you try to use an extension tube, just keep in mind the lens will have no aperture value, especially if you are using a newer lens with no aperture ring. You will only have the ability to change the shutter speed to gain the proper exposure, and the focus will be very very narrow.

I will say that purple is one of the most difficult colors to shoot photographically in the digital age. The color tone always wants to shift blue, so getting a true purple is actually very difficult. I did try this out last year, and got totally different results, but you can see those at Testing the Oil and Water Theory Close Up. So this is my interpretation of “purple” for this week. See you here again next week with whatever the theme happens to be next week.

I was trying to think back at how many laptops and desktop computers I have had over the past 20 years (including an actual IBM 5150 from the 1980’s), but there is just no way in the world to know. My first computers weren’t Gateway or Dell, but were hand built IBM machines where I picked out each RAM chip, video card, modem, the CPU chip and so on, each separately. Wow those were the days

You can get a lot of life out of old machines for secondary purposes, and sites like iFixit with their step by step teardown of almost every single Mac ever made is a great place for do easy repairs, even iFixit on this old MacBook5,1. More and more these once great laptops are being replaced by better and better tablets, like the iPad, and Nexus 7, I already wonder how we ever lugged around such a massive device.

For the last few weeks when I finally got around to reviewing the images for my Project 365 (see gallery of all P365 images here) I always seem to have a unique sunset or sunrise photo I like. The above shot wasn’t actually an official P365 image, but I really like how the abstract, somewhat pastel, sunrise turned out. This shot above was taken with my iPhone out of the window of my office-study around 6am while I was doing my daily routine of reading.

This week was a super busy week all around, and the images are really from all over the place. Two images in this set are part of larger posts, one of Deborah, which was posted yesterday, and another below is one image in a full set of images to be posted later in the week. These images represent my week well, and they are really all over the place, but my favorite image really has nothing to do with good photography, it has to do with the power of a yellow sticky note. I’m not sure I’ve ever received a more encouraging note on a computer left for me to fix. On a day I had almost no extra time to do anything I was handed a computer that didn’t work because of an unfortunate coffee spill directly on the computer’s keyboard. This note, and the fact that the computer was actually able to be cleaned up and get it fixed within about an hour was such a great end to my work week.

Wow yet another week has come and gone. This is my weekly Project 365 post which includes a week where we had our kids and grandkids out to visit from Colorado and go to do a quick family photo shoot one afternoon. The images below are the chosen images for Day 223 through Day 229. You can see the entire shoot on Flickr at http://P365.me.

My favorite shot again this week was a sunset (above), which ended up being a little similar to last week but not. I love sunsets, and this one came right after a heavy summer rain shower when the sun peeked just below the clouds. The shot above was taken with my iPhone 4S, a camera that continues to amaze me each week. We finally started to get some rain in our area and this week was one afternoon shower after another. Hard to complain about the rain when we have been in a drought for so long, but it did make for some very hot and humid days, something our family from Colorado thought was a little less than pleasant. I love how different each week’s photos turn out in this project, next week is sure to be more of the same… different.

Another week of 2012 is just about over, can’t believe it. I usually work on my Project 365 posts on Saturday afternoon and today I just decided to post the week below. The images below are the chosen images for Day 216 through Day 222. You can see the entire shoot on Flickr at http://P365.me. I started doing this a while back in a post series called Saturday Summary when I started looking back at each week through the photos I took. I haven’t posted in that series in a while, but decided to resurrect it for today.

I took this shot above with my iPhone as we walked back to the car from dinner over at Five Guys. It doesn’t always work, but I love shooting directly into the sun, mainly because not many people do it because it way over exposes the shot, but here it worked. I love this section of Auburn, there isn’t much down here on college that isn’t more Auburn than Toomer’s Corner. I had a few people ask me about the full high res version of this image, so I just decided to post it here as Sun Setting Over Toomer’s Drugs in Auburn (high res version). You are welcome to download it from that page, please don’t sell it.

That shot above reminds me how close it is to football season now and that first game at the Georgia Dome on September 1st. The weeks do go by so fast. War Eagle.

It’s the first part of July and I finally got around to updating my June Project 365 Photos (read about my Project 365 here). I am up to day 215, as of June 30th, which makes me 58.74% of the way through this project. Sometimes it feels like I’m taking the same photo every day, but I keep trying to find a unique image each day, and so far I have 215 unique images over my my Flickr gallery. My favorite shot (that was not published previously on my site) for the month of June is above, probably because it is a little more abstract. This huge storm came up while I was sitting in the Publix parking lot waiting for Deb to come out, and this shot was the result.

I still have mixed feelings about this project. It’s a pain in the neck, it takes time, it’s every single day with no break, and it’s a unbelievably accurate look at your life one photo at a time. Just like all photography, when I look at each individual image, I can remember great details about each day, just because I took one single photo. The mind is an amazing thing, and images create a very strong reminder in the brain, causing us to remember details we would otherwise have long forgotten. I know there is some psychological reasoning behind this, but once that image is taken, it takes certain details and moves them from our short-term RAM memory and places them in the long-term storage. That’s what I love about photography.

Just 151 more days and photos to take, and I can’t wait for November 29th when I can say it is finished. You can see a few previous blog posts on Project 365 here. To see the full gallery over on Flickr just go to http://P365.me.

May is over and June is here. Hard to believe. I’m still working on my Project 365 for 2012, and so far, I haven’t missed a single day since November 29th (the day I started because that’s when my year starts). I am constantly amazed by this project. I have wanted to complete it for 15+ years, and I know why I haven’t up to this point, it still remains far more difficult than I had ever anticipated when I started last November. Something I have found quite interesting is my iPhone is the overwhelming king of this project. I have used it for about 75% of the shots instead of my Nikon, which I hadn’t really expected when I started.

In the same way journaling provides an excellent look back at what was accomplished, or just what happened on a particular date, this project is giving me a snap shot of my day, week, month, and year. Sometimes I have very little to take a picture of, sometimes I don’t remember until I’ve been ready for bed, then it’s a test of creativity to take a photo in the dark, of something interesting. Anyway, it has been a great project so far, and above you will see the snapshot for May 2012. My favorite for the month are below. To see the full gallery over on Flickr just go to http://P365.me.

I captured this big guy crossing the road over by our house on the way home from work yesterday, and while he was sitting in my truck I took this shot with my iPhone. My intentions were to keep him from getting run over by picking him up, putting him in the trunk, and bringing him over to a new greener pasture (literally) and a nice pond already stocked with his friends. He was quite heavy and as soon as I picked him up his nails pushed my hand off his shell and I dropped him in the grass. Luckily he was only about a foot off the ground, but as one of my little nephews pointed out, his leg was bleeding. It wasn’t bad, but the turtle was startled for sure, and spent the better part of 30 minutes in his shell, refusing to come out even when he was put in the water.

He eventually stuck his head above water to take a breath, and then finally stretched out his legs and swam away into the big open expanse. It got me thinking about how often we shrink back into the safety of our shells when someone is trying to help us, even if the help sometimes hurts. Well, he should be making new friends now, and he also made my Project 365photo of the day (gallery), hopefully he will stay off the roads now.

This is one of my favorite places in our backyard, and of course if you have been around this site for a while you will recognize the tree swing, but I keep finding unique ways to shoot it. I’m working on getting all the photos on my site of this swing to be searchable through “my swing” but they aren’t all up there quite yet. Yesterday afternoon I was cutting the grass and noticed the sun setting right behind the tree and actually took this shot while I was on the tractor, mowing. I later stopped and tried to setup a better shot with Deborah in the swing but none turned out as this one did with the sun right in my face. Today it was my Project 365 photo for Day 158.